Earthquake shakes SF Bay Area

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — People across the San Francisco Bay Area felt the rumblings of a small earthquake on Saturday night, but there were no reports of any damages or injuries.

The magnitude-3.6 earthquake struck just before 7:05 p.m. and was centered near the city of Hercules at a depth of about 5 1/2 miles, according to a preliminary report from the United States Geological Survey.

The epicenter was about eight miles north of Berkeley and 17 miles northeast of San Francisco’s Civic Center.

The USGS National Earthquake Information Center said it received scores of reports of people feeling the shaking across the Bay Area, especially in Oakland and Alameda.

“It probably wasn’t strong enough for damage, but it was widely felt by people,” said Sheng Zao Chen, a geophysicist at the USGS

Police and fire officials in the area said there were no reports of any problems from the quake.

Many Bay Area residents took to Twitter and Facebook to joke that the mild tremors were the beginnings of the apocalypse, as the quake came about an hour after the widely publicized predictions of cataclysm from Oakland Christian media founder Harold Camping.

“Is that all you’ve got apocalypse?!” Erin Webb of San Francisco wrote on Twitter.